Sam Altman survived a boardroom coup at OpenAI last year, but Elon Musk‘s not dropping. The billionaire sued him and the company, which is partnered with Microsoft, in San Francisco court for breach of contract.
“This case is filed to compel OpenAI to adhere to the Founding Agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual Defendants and the largest technology company in the world,” the suit said.
“Mr. Musk has long recognized that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity—perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today,” it said, referring to Artifical General Intelligence. “Our entire economy is based around the fact that humans work together and come up with the best solutions to a hard task. If a machine can solve nearly any task better than we can, that machine becomes more economically useful than we are
“But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power.”
The suit said Musk grew concerned back in 2014 when Microsoft acquired research group DeepMind in 2014 and was “catapulted to the front of the race for AGI, and Altman “purported to share Mr. Musk’s concern.”
Altman, Musk and Gregory Brockman (who is also named in the suit) joined forces to form a non-profit AI lab that would try to catch up to Google in the AGI race, but with some key differences. It would be a nonprofit “developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder returns. And it would be “open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations, and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons.”
Reflecting the founding agreement, the suit said, Musk named the new AI lab OpenAI. Its certificate of Incorporation says “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person.”
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